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Inquiry,Vol. 53, No. 2, 183–207, April 2010

0020-174X Print/1502-3923 Online/10/020183–25 © 2010 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/00201741003612203

SINQ0020-174X1502-3923Inquiry, Vol. 53, No. 2, Jan 2010: pp. 0–0InquiryMcDowell and Dreyfus on Unreflective Action

McDowell and Dreyfus on Unreflective ActionErik RietveldERIK RIETVELD

Harvard University, USA

(Received 22 November 2007)

ABSTRACT Within philosophy there is not yet an integrative account of unreflectiveskillful action. As a starting point, contributions would be required from philosophersfrom both the analytic and continental traditions. Starting from the McDowell-Dreyfusdebate, shared Aristotelian-Wittgensteinian common ground is identified. McDowelland Dreyfus agree about the importance of embodied skills, situation-specific discern-ment and responsiveness to relevant affordances. This sheds light on the embodied andsituated nature of adequate unreflective action and provides a starting point for thedevelopment of an account that does justice to insights from both philosophical traditions.

I. Introduction

In many1 episodes in our daily lives we act adequately, yet unreflectively.Currently within philosophy there is no integrative account of unreflectiveskillful action (henceforth “unreflective action”). To achieve this, contribu-tions from both analytic philosophers and philosophers with roots in thecontinental tradition would be required. Such a new, integrative philosophi-cal account of unreflective action has potentially emerged from the recentdebate between John McDowell (2007a, 2007b) and Hubert Dreyfus (2005,2007a, 2007b). However, this could well be overlooked because one’s atten-tion may naturally be drawn to their discussions of disagreements about theroles of, for instance, conceptuality, mindedness and rationality. These issuesare interesting but not the best basis for developing a better understanding ofunreflective action (for which Dreyfus generally uses the term “skillful cop-ing”).2 The aim of this paper is to uncover the Aristotelian-Wittgensteiniancommon ground in their positions and to show that, notwithstanding the

Correspondence Address: Erik Rietveld, Harvard University, Fellow in Philosophy, Departmentof Philosophy, Emerson Hall, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. Email: [email protected]

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exceptions that I will discuss in the second half of this paper, they are inbroad agreement about the relevant phenomena. Along the way we will seethat a focus on their common ground sheds new light on the issues that havearisen in the debate and potentially dissolves some of the points of disagree-ment between the two philosophers.

McDowell (1996) rightly reminds us that what is natural is not exhaustedby the realm of causal law. Our second nature, acquired from socio-culturalpractices, is nature too, and the expression of second nature in unreflectivebodily coping is not a brute causal event. From Dreyfus (2007a, 2007b) andCharles Taylor (2002), on the other hand, we can learn that the intentional-ity, normativity and rationality of unreflective action are interestingly differ-ent from those of thought and of reflective action and can best beunderstood on their own terms. That is to say that we should try to steerclear of the terminology of reflective (propositionally structured) intentional-ity and rationality (i.e., of rationality in the strong sense), which is McDowell’sprimary interest.3

In order to realize the aim of uncovering shared Aristotelian-Wittgensteiniancommon ground, I fully support McDowell in his efforts to dismantle thedeep dualism of the normative and the natural by holding on to the idea of“a naturalism of second nature” (McDowell, 1996, p. 86), while, in contrastto McDowell, stressing that the resulting reconciliation of norms and naturein “partially enchanted” (p. 85) nature, needs to recognize the particularitiesof unreflective action, including its experiential specifics as emphasized byDreyfus (2007a, 2007b). I will do this not by referring to what McDowell(1996, p. 5), following Wilfrid Sellars, calls the “space of reasons”, but, in anattempt to do justice to the phenomenology of normativity in unreflectiveaction, by emphasizing the importance of responsiveness to normative signifi-cance. Our responsiveness to relevant “affordances”, which I have investi-gated in Rietveld (2008c), is an unreflective form of this. Affordances arepossibilities for action offered by the environment (Gibson, 1979; Michaels,2003; Chemero, 2003).

In Section II, I will argue that McDowell shares with phenomenologistsand Wittgensteinians the will to do justice to the phenomena. Establishingas a preliminary point that McDowell cares about getting the phenomenaright is important, because in the second half of this paper I will argue thata weakness of his account is that aspects of it do not entirely fit in with thephenomenon of unreflective action. In Section III, I would like to showthat although Dreyfus and McDowell disagree about the role rationalityplays in unreflective action, they share a particular interpretation of Aris-totle’s ideas of practical wisdom (phronesis) and that they both emphasizethe importance of the individual’s sensitivity to the demands of the specificsituation. McDowell and Dreyfus agree that situation-specific discernmentforms the Aristotelian core of an adequate account of unreflective action.A thorough understanding of this is important because it forms the “lean


McDowell and Dreyfus on Unreflective Action 185

and mean” core of the integrative account of unreflective action that Ienvision.

In Sections IV to VI, I will argue that although McDowell’s account ofrationality and conceptuality in a strong sense is not wrong, it is limitedinsofar as it does not completely take into account the characteristics of thephenomenon of unreflective action. In fact, McDowell’s account of thesestrong notions results in tensions when it is confronted with good phenome-nological descriptions of unreflective action. Moreover, in Sections V andVI, I will try to understand why McDowell, who generally manifests an out-standing feeling for the phenomena, is so eager to claim that concepts in hisstrong sense do play a role in unreflective action. He seems to fear that with-out a role for conceptuality we would not be able to place unreflective actionin the category called space of reasons, being rather forced to see it as deter-mined by disenchanted causal interaction. This would block an account ofits freedom, rationality and normativity. Yet, although as a generalapproach this may be fine for his purpose, the tensions just mentioned sug-gest that it is not an optimal solution in the case of unreflective action. Anaccount that does justice to unreflective action on its own terms, i.e., byfocusing on its non-propositional responsiveness to normative significance,rather than on the terms of reflective accounts of intentionality, does notproduce such tensions. This basically amounts to an alternative presentationof the phenomena, a presentation for another purpose (viz. doing full justiceto the particularities of unreflective action) than the one McDowell is prima-rily interested in.

II. The relevance of a tailored account of unreflective action

Dreyfus and McDowell have a lot in common. Both philosophers emphasizethe situated nature of our engagements with the world. They share a non-skeptical reading of Wittgenstein’s ideas on rule-following and stress thatnormativity always already plays a role, even in the bedrock of unreflectiveaction. They accept that unreflective activity is “pervasively bodily”(McDowell, 2007b, p. 370). Moreover, they agree that unreflective action ofhumans and non-human animals involves responsiveness to affordances.4

And even though they acknowledge the importance and success of theempirical sciences, they presumably both believe in an irreducible role forphenomenology.5 This last commonality might be less obvious than the others,but McDowell’s commitment to phenomenology follows from his Wittgenstein-ian conception of philosophy, as I will show in the second part of Section II.First, however, I will take a closer look at the relevance of a custom-tailoredaccount of unreflective action.

Why do we need an account of unreflective action on its own terms ratherthan in the more general terms that philosophers like McDowell use forunderstanding reflective intentionality? Over the course of this paper it will


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become clear that without such a tailored account we will not be able tounderstand how we simply do things intelligently, yet without explicitthought. For example, we will not be able to understand how it is possible toact normatively in a more or less instinctive way; how it is possible to followa rule “blindly” (Wittgenstein, 1953; cf. Rietveld, 2008c). The non-propositional(bodily or “motor”) intentionality (Merleau-Ponty, 2002/1945; Dreyfus,2002a, 2002b; Kelly, 2005; Thompson, 2007; Thybo Jensen, 2009) of unre-flective action is sufficiently different from the intentionality of explicitthought and reflective action to make the development of a tailored concep-tual framework worthwhile. We will see that McDowell’s conceptual frame-work, which was developed for understanding reflective intentionality, doesnot fit in well with the phenomenon of unreflective action. ApplyingMcDowell’s heavy framework where the subtleties of unreflective humanbehavior in context are concerned is sometimes like repairing a torn spider’sweb with one’s fingers (cf. Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, p.106.Henceforth PI).

The tensions resulting from McDowell’s use of some of his technicalnotions, such as for instance conceptuality, in the context of unreflectiveaction have been the main issue in his debate with Dreyfus. Dreyfus’ mostimportant arguments against McDowell’s account are based on the phe-nomenology of unreflective action. However, we must not forget thatMcDowell maintains his conceptual framework for a reason: it is his way ofmaking sure that unreflective action is not misunderstood as a brute causalevent. Could an account of unreflective action on its own (explicitly non-propositional) terms make it possible to develop a better fitting and moreconcise conceptual framework that does justice to its specific phenomenol-ogy and normativity? Would such a tailored account, rather than thinking interms of the established categories of the philosophy of thought and reflec-tive action, avoid problems in understanding unreflective action? Let megive an example of a misunderstanding that arose in the debate betweenMcDowell and Dreyfus.

Their debate focuses on McDowell’s claims that, in the case of humans,unreflective bodily coping is conceptual and that such unreflective action ispermeated with rationality and mindedness. McDowell holds that in unre-flective action there is no reasoning but, nevertheless, there is responsivenessto reasons. Given that according to Dreyfus these reasons do not have anyphenomenological reality for the skilled individual during our unreflectiveperformances, he sees no other way to interpret the individual’s responsive-ness to reasons than by saying that for McDowell reasons have become hab-its that influence activity:

McDowell concludes that, [. . . t]hanks to our inculcation into our cul-ture, we become sensitive to reasons, which then influence our “habitsof thought and action”.



One can easily accept that in learning to be wise we learn to follow gen-eral reasons as guides to acting appropriately. But it does not followthat, once we have gotten past the learning phase, these reasons in theform of habits still influence our wise actions. (Dreyfus, 2005, pp. 50–51,quoting McDowell, 1996, p. 84)

One may respond to this by saying that Dreyfus should have known thatMcDowell’s notion of “responsiveness to reasons” does not mean that rea-sons (neither general nor situation-specific) somehow influence the actions ofan expert, in this case Aristotle’s practically wise person, the phronimos.6

However, the fact remains that in unreflective action, responsiveness to rea-sons is something that is certainly not open to view, to use Wittgenstein’sexpression. Unlike responsiveness to normative significance, responsivenessto reasons is not experienced by us in unreflective action. That makes“responsiveness to reasons” an abstract, theory-dependent and potentiallymisleading term.

This example shows that misunderstandings can easily arise as a result ofthe fact that McDowell’s conceptual framework for the philosophy ofthought and reflective intentionality does not match well with the phenome-nology of unreflective action. Could an account that describes unreflectiveaction on its own terms, which uses a different and sparser conceptualframework, avoid this type of problem? Would not an account of unreflec-tive action that does not give the central role to responsiveness to reasonsbut to responsiveness to normative significance be a better account?

In the final part of this section I will try to clarify why McDowell caresabout the phenomenology of unreflective action. Most of Dreyfus’ argu-ments against McDowell’s framework are phenomenological. The phenome-nology of unreflective action plays a major role because, as mentionedabove, tensions arise when McDowell’s account is confronted with the phe-nomena. For this reason it makes sense to try to understand why McDowellshould care about this type of argument at all. Why would it matter to himthat there is a tension between this phenomenology and his framework ofintentionality? My claim is that McDowell’s commitment to phenomenolog-ical accuracy follows from his Wittgensteinian conception of philosophy.Wittgenstein has a role for a certain form of phenomenology that is import-ant for McDowell, because it is what remains of philosophy in the hypothet-ical situation in which all ungrounded or mistaken philosophicalassumptions have been rejected. Let me elaborate on this.

What would Wittgenstein’s form of everyday phenomenological descrip-tion of behavior be in its most minimal form? In the sections of PI that dealwith his method of philosophy, Wittgenstein suggests the following:

Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use [. . . ]; it can inthe end only describe it. [. . . ]


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It leaves everything as it is. (PI 124)

Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nordeduces anything.

Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain. (PI 126)

But even though “everything lies open to view” (PI 126), this type of “everydayphenomenology” (Thornton, 2004, p. 19) cannot somehow simply “reassertitself”, as was suggested by McDowell according to Tim Thornton (2004,p. 19).7 At least not if Thornton or McDowell means by “reassert itself” thatthe reasserting happens automatically or is obvious and effortless. Someonehas to do the phenomenological work. A phenomenological description ofbehavior in the context of “the whole hurly-burly”8 of activity does notappear automatically, but is an ordering of phenomena generated by some-one from a certain point of view and for a particular purpose (compare PI127). It is “an order with a particular end in view; one out of many possibleorders; not the order” (PI 132). Moreover, Wittgenstein reminds us that suchan ordering of phenomena is not as obvious as it may seem. It is very hard todo it well, because we often fail to see what is most important for our every-day dealings with the world, precisely because of our familiarity with theeveryday world.9 Mark Wrathall (2005) mentions an example of somethingfamiliar that remained unnoticed for centuries. Only relatively recently havepainters found out that the light in the eye of a painted figure makes a hugedifference to our experience of the expressive quality of the painting.

Rejecting the assumption that everyday phenomenology simply reassertsitself when all Wittgensteinian therapy has fulfilled its task is important,because it helps to understand McDowell’s commitment to and appreciationof phenomenological insights, which is a recurrent theme in his work.10

According to McDowell the deepest dualism, the one that is the source of allthe familiar dualisms of modern philosophy (mind and world, subject andobject, mind and body, etc.), is “a dualism of norm and nature” (McDowell,1996, p. 93). Even after all the assumptions on which this dualism dependshave been undermined, there is still work to be done for philosophers: con-tributing to the difficult task of a correct everyday phenomenology of normsin (re-enchanted) nature.

III. An Aristotelian framework of unreflective action

Responding to relevant affordances (or solicitations) can be seen as a para-digmatic form of unreflective action (Rietveld, 2008b). A skilled individual’sresponse to an affordance in context can be understood as a minimal episodeof skillful action. As mentioned in the introduction, McDowell and Dreyfusagree that “our perceptual openness to affordances [. . . ] is necessarilybound up with our embodied coping skills” and that we share this with other



animals (McDowell, 2007a, p. 344). In his paper “What myth?” (2007a)McDowell is responding to Dreyfus’ (2005) APA Pacific Division PresidentialAddress. McDowell stresses that, contrary to what Dreyfus had suggested inthat lecture, for him unreflective action is not situation-independent. BothMcDowell and Dreyfus have developed their understanding of unreflectiveaction on the basis of Aristotle’s ideas on phronesis. Let me elaborate on theAristotelian common ground of sensitivity to the specific situation thatMcDowell and Dreyfus share. This aspect of phronesis can function as agood starting point for a new account of unreflective action. In this section Iwill also discuss their ideas on the role of rationality in phronesis.

McDowell and Dreyfus agree that an excellent example of human skillfulaction and expertise is provided by Aristotle’s phronimos, the agent of phro-nesis. In a specific situation, the unreflective action of this ethical expertsomehow11 takes not only all relevant virtues into account (friendship, jus-tice, etc.), but on top of that also the right time, the right way of acting, etc.,and all this in relation to ourselves (see for example Aristotle’s NicomacheanEthics, henceforth NE, NE 1106b21-b24, NE 1107a1-a3). The content ofpractical wisdom cannot

be captured in general prescriptions for conduct, determinatelyexpressible independently of the concrete situations in which thephronimos is called on to act. (McDowell, 2007a, p. 340)

More surprisingly perhaps, it is not only Dreyfus but also McDowell whoagrees with Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle’s ideas on practicalwisdom as being sensitive to a very rich as well as a highly specific situation.McDowell puts it as follows:

Heidegger depicts Aristotelian practical wisdom as, in Dreyfus’ words,‘a kind of understanding that makes possible an immediate response tothe full concrete situation’. Dreyfus quotes Heidegger saying this:‘[The phronimos. . . ] is determined by his situation in the largest sense.[. . . ] The circumstances, the givens, the times and the people vary. Themeaning of the action [. . . ] varies as well [. . . ]. It is precisely theachievement of phronesis to disclose the [individual] as acting now inthe full situation within which he acts.’ (McDowell, 2007a, p. 340, citingDreyfus, 2005, p. 51, which contains a quote from Heidegger, 1997, p.101, Dreyfus’ italics).

McDowell comments on this, saying: “But that is just how I understandAristotelian practical wisdom” (McDowell, 2007a, p. 340). The phronimosdoes not need to deliberate prior to acting, because he sees what is the rightthing to do in what Aristotle (NE 1142a25) calls the “ultimate particularthing”, namely the concrete situation (McDowell, 2007a, p. 340). He possesses


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a “concretely situation-specific discernment” and is therefore able to do justiceto the full situation (2007a, p. 340).

According to both Dreyfus and McDowell, the phronimos gets things rightthanks to a “reliable sensitivity” to the demands of the specific situation(Thornton, 2004, p. 92, McDowell, 1998, Dreyfus, 2005, p. 54). McDowellexplains that this sensitivity has to encompass all the virtues and is thereforebest understood in a holistic way, as an acquired “single complex sensitivity”(McDowell, 1998, p. 53; Thornton, 2004, p. 93). What the phronimos is sensi-tive to depends on his concerns in the specific situation. In order to under-stand why the phronimos responds to one affordance rather than another we,as observers, have to try to understand the situation as far as possible fromhis perspective, that is, in accordance with his concerns and capacities.

Perceptual sensitivity is crucial in McDowell’s account of phronesis,because ultimately that determines what the phronimos sees as the relevantaspect of the situation; why he responds to this feature rather than that fea-ture. I would like to suggest that this salient feature is best understood as therelevant affordance soliciting action, because, as a result of perceiving it, thephronimos “is moved to act by this concern rather than that one” (McDowell,1998, p. 68).

This makes clear that McDowell’s account of phronesis does not positintermediary propositional reasons that divorce the acting individual fromthe motivating world. Rather, the perceived aspect of the situation directlymotivates a correct response. Thornton describes McDowell’s position asfollows:

[Phronesis] involves seeing, in the situation, specific features that callfor a specific response. [. . . ] It is merely a product of scientism toassume that the world cannot contain features whose perceptionincludes motivational factors. (Thornton, 2004, p. 94).

I understand this way of acting of the phronimos as a form of sensitivity-based appreciation of the particular situation, which means that he simplyperceives solicitation x (rather than solicitation y or z) and is immediatelydrawn to respond to it (he is “moved to act”, McDowell, 1998, p. 68). A par-ticular aspect of the individual’s “conception of how to live shows itself”, inthat he responds to this solicitation rather than to another possible solicita-tion (cf. McDowell, 1998, pp. 68–69). More generally, McDowell holds thattraining and experience enrich “one’s sensitivities to kinds of similaritiesbetween situations [. . . ]” (McDowell, 1998, p. 64). It is interesting to notethat this account of situation-specific discernment is very similar to Dreyfus’Merleau-Pontian ideas on sensitivity to relevance in the situation (Dreyfus,2007c; Merleau-Ponty, 2002/1945).

To get the whole picture of the Aristotelian common ground shared byDreyfus and McDowell, it is also important to note that the latter appears to



agree with the Heideggerian interpretation of Aristotelian practical wisdomas “a kind of understanding” (Dreyfus’ 2005, as cited in McDowell, 2007a,p. 340, my italics). This notion of understanding means, as Dreyfusexplained in the lecture to which McDowell responds, expressing a kind ofknow-how or performing in a skilled way (Dreyfus, 2005, p. 59). Finally,with a bit of reciprocal goodwill McDowell and Dreyfus should be able toagree that phronesis is a habitus, an ingrained skill, or a set of skills acquiredin socio-cultural practice, the learning process that McDowell calls Bildung.Phronesis amounts to “the habit of responding to situations as phronesisrequires” (McDowell, 2007a, p. 341).

McDowell and Dreyfus, however, have a difference of opinion about theroles of rationality and concepts in such understanding. I will briefly explainMcDowell’s particular use of the notion of rationality and Dreyfus’ criticismof it, before turning to the role of rationality in phronesis. The issue ofconceptuality will be discussed in Section IV.

McDowell’s use of the notion of concepts should be understood in con-nection with his particular understanding of rationality (2007c, p. 3), i.e.,situation-specific yet “strong rationality” in unreflective action. McDowell(1996) sees the normal mature human being as a rational animal. In the pro-cess of upbringing or Bildung one is initiated in a tradition and language,and acquires a second nature of a distinctively rational form. Importantly,the acquisition of conceptual capacities is dependent upon language-acquisi-tion (McDowell, 1996, pp. 125–26). Pre-linguistic children do not possessconcepts in McDowell’s strong sense. Moreover, once acquired, conceptualcapacities belong to a linguistic or reflective faculty (McDowell, 1996, p. 49).

Let me briefly mention the context in which McDowell introduces thenotion of Bildung in Mind and World. He uses this notion to “defuse the fearof supernaturalism” (1996, p. 84) that some might experience as a result ofhis picture of responsiveness to the demands of reason. He wants to showthat the normal maturation of human beings, their acquisition of secondnature, moulds “motivational and evaluative propensities”, (McDowell,1998a, p. 185), and leads to sensitivity to the demands of reason, whichtherefore is not something supernatural or occult. To quote him:

[T]he very idea of sensitivity to real demands of reason looks spooky,unless we can reconstruct it from materials that are naturalistic in therelevant sense. [. . . O]rdinary upbringing can shape the actions andthoughts of human beings in a way that brings these demands in view.(McDowell, 1996, p. 82)

The notion of Bildung makes comprehensible that responsiveness to norms isnot spooky. According to McDowell, we will avoid the dualism of normsand nature if we keep Bildung in the back of our minds, in other words, if wedo not forget second nature. Bildung gives one the capacity to step back and


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reflect. The core of McDowell’s notion of rationality is that mature humanbeings are different from what he calls “mere animals” and what I will sim-ply call “animals”, because they have the capacity to be responsive “to rea-sons as such” (2007b, p. 366). A mature human being (henceforth “human”)has the capacity to step back and assess whether or not her putative reasonswarrant the action she is inclined to take (McDowell, 2007c, pp. 1–2). Weshould keep in mind that this type of rationality is situation-specific accord-ing to McDowell (2007a, pp. 4–6). Moreover, it does not need any delibera-tion, reasoning or words:

When one is unreflectively immersed, one is exactly not exercising theability to step back. [. . . ] Nothing is discursively explicit in thesegoings-on [. . . ] (McDowell, 2007b, p. 366).

McDowell calls the specific type of rationality in which he is interested“rationality in the strong sense” (hereinafter for the sake of brevity “strongrationality”) in order to distinguish it from other types of rationality.12

McDowell claims that in the case of humans, but not animals, strong ration-ality permeates action, including unreflective action (2007a, p. 339, 2007b,p. 368). McDowell tries to explain how it makes a difference that activity ispermeated with strong rationality by means of the following example of askill that both humans and animals can possess:

[C]onsider catching a flying object. When a rational agent catches a fris-bee, she is realizing a concept of a thing to do. [. . . O]f, say, catching this.(Think of a case in which, as one walks across a park, a frisbee fliestowards one, and one catches it in the spur of the moment.) When a dogcatches a frisbee, he is not realizing any practical concept; in the relevantsense, he has none. The point of saying that the rational agent, unlike thedog, is realizing a concept in doing what she does is that her doing, undera specification that captures the content of the practical concept that sheis realizing, comes within the scope of her practical rationality – even ifonly in that, if asked why she caught the frisbee, she would answer “Noparticular reason; I just felt like it”. (McDowell, 2007b, pp. 368–69)

Even when we are engaged in absorbed coping and do not step back andreflect, strong rationality is nevertheless “operative” or “at work”, accordingto McDowell, because a rational animal could step back (2007b, p. 366;McDowell, 2007a, p. 344).

Dreyfus criticizes McDowell’s claim that the ability to use linguistic con-cepts is in some way “operative” in unreflective action:

Capacities are exercised on occasion, but that does not allow one toconclude that, even when they are not exercised, they are, nonetheless,



“operative” and thus pervade all our activities. Capacities can’t per-vade anything. (Dreyfus, 2007b, p. 372)

Moreover, according to Dreyfus, in a flow of skillful action one could notstep back without disturbing one’s responsiveness to solicitations and one’sperformance.

Let us return to the role of rationality in the paradigm case of phronesis.McDowell claims that the actions of the phronimos are rational also in unre-flective action without prior deliberation.

We [should] stop assuming that the virtuous person’s judgement is theresult of balancing reasons for and against. The view of a situation thathe arrives at by exercising his sensitivity is one in which some aspect ofthe situation is seen as constituting a reason for acting in some way [. . . ](McDowell, 1998, p. 56)

That this reason for acting does not need to be experienced as a reason in theunreflective episode should by now be sufficiently clear. McDowell is nottalking about the lived experience of the individual here.

Practical wisdom does not need maxims which operate in the background,because phronesis, according to McDowell (2007a, p. 351), does not involverationality behind action but rationality “in action”. This basically meansthat the rationality of the phronimos “is displayed in what he does” (2007a,p. 341). So for McDowell, rationality in unreflective action is neitherdetached, nor discursively explicit, but nevertheless it does show itself in theactivity. Moreover, the Aristotelian notion of second nature is crucial inMcDowell’s account of phronesis, because for him phronesis in unreflectiveaction is a case of “a properly formed practical intellect at work” (McDowell,2007a, p. 342). Furthermore, McDowell stresses that for Aristotle anemphasis on situation-specific discernment is not incompatible with the pos-sibility of situation-specific linguistic expression (2007a, p. 342). The possib-ility of putting discernment into words plays a crucial role in McDowell’sconceptual framework (see Section IV).

To conclude, McDowell and Dreyfus concur that an expert in action isnot applying a general maxim or subsuming cases under rules that could bearticulated by abstracting from the specific situation. Situation-specific dis-cernment and responsiveness to relevant affordances form the core of theAristotelian common ground that the two philosophers share. Bildung orupbringing, training and experience are accumulated in embodied skills,which reveals that there is nothing mysterious in this sensitivity.

As far as their disagreement on rationality is concerned, Dreyfus is, in myopinion, right that McDowell’s frisbee-case does not succeed in making itvery plausible that a human is (and that a dog is not) realizing a practicalconcept during the act of catching a frisbee. If we focus on what is displayed


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in action, as McDowell (2007a, p. 341) rightly suggested that we should,then what this example does make clear is that rationality, in McDowell’sstrong sense that distinguishes rational animals from “mere animals”, is onlydisplayed in her exercising the capacity to step back or to reflect.13 In otherwords, the only rationality shown in this example, over and above therationality of catching the frisbee adequately, was that the person was ableto say at a later moment why she caught it.

To make progress on the nature of rationality in unreflective action, itwould be useful to examine what we can learn about rationality from Witt-genstein’s discussion of “blind” rule-following (PI 217, 219; see Rietveld,2008c) for a discussion of the non-propositional normativity of blind rulefollowing). That investigation will have to wait for another occasion, how-ever. I now turn to the discussion of some other aspects of unreflectiveaction.

IV. McDowell and Dreyfus on aspects of unreflective action

We have seen that situation-specific discernment characterizes phronesisin unreflective action. Discernment in this sense is not definable becausethat would impose a certain generality that this form of perception doesnot have. This type of (perceptual) understanding nevertheless allows forcorrect “situation-specific conceptual articulation”, according toMcDowell (2007a, p. 342). Dreyfus (2007a, 2007b) would probably bewilling to accept this, as long as conceptual articulation occurs post hoc, ispartial and involves a transformation of pre-reflective experience. ButMcDowell’s claim is stronger. Their disagreement regarding conceptualityarises primarily because McDowell claims that in an episode of such unre-flective action, concepts, in the sense that will be introduced below, are“operative”.

Let me now first introduce McDowell’s notion of concepts. In thesecond part of this section I will assess the suitability of this notion forunreflective action. I hope to show convincingly that there is a certain ten-sion in his account. In the final two sections (V and VI) of this paper,Charles Taylor’s comments on McDowell will be used to shed light on theorigins of this tension and suggest an important distinction that could helpMcDowell to realize his main aim of overcoming the assumptions underly-ing the dualism between norm and nature, while also doing justice to thephenomena.

Concepts, according to McDowell, are operative in all perception andaction, including the most unreflective perception and action. As we haveseen in Section III, his (1996) notion of concepts is language-dependent(which is why I will sometimes speak of “linguistic concepts”), but it is so ina subtle way that contests the idea that we have a word ready for everyaspect of our experience. He does not claim,



that we are ready in advance with words for every aspect of the content ofour experience, nor that we could equip ourselves with words for everyaspect of the content of our experience.14 (McDowell, 2007a, p. 348)

McDowell accepts that our pre-reflective experience will never actually bearticulated fully. Nevertheless, he holds, we can always articulate a part of it,because either we already have words for aspects of the experience, or wecan use our language abilities to make up new expressions that could putsome aspects into words. What is crucial for McDowell, is his claim that thecontent of our experience, even in unreflective action, is present in a formthat is suitable for linguistic expression. In McDowell’s own words:

What is important is this: if an experience is world-disclosing, whichimplies that it is categorically unified, all its content is present in a formin which, as I put before, it is suitable to constitute contents of concep-tual capacities. All that would be needed for a bit of it to come to con-stitute the content of a conceptual capacity, [. . . ] is for it to be focusedon and made to be the meaning of a linguistic expression. (2007a,pp. 347–48)

The experience of a person who has acquired language is of a form thatopens the potential for linguistically articulating aspects of the experience,even in cases in which the right words are not yet available. McDowell’s ideaof conceptual capacities is basically not about the actual link betweenaspects of content and linguistic expression, but about the possible linkbetween aspects of content and linguistic expression. To quote McDowellagain:

[L]anguage enables us to have experience that [. . . ] has content that isconceptual in the sense that I have introduced [. . . ] No aspect isunnameable, but that does not require us to pretend to make sense ofan ideal position in which we have a name for every aspect, let alone tobe in such a position. (2007a, p. 348)

McDowell’s emphasis on this potential (as opposed to the actuality) ofconceptualization/articulation implies that we “do not need to havewords for all the content that is conceptually available to us” (McDowell,2007a, p. 348).15

Does McDowell make clear why it would make sense to say that conceptsare operative in unreflective action? To answer this question I now turn to atension in McDowell’s account of concepts in the case of absorbed coping.This tension has to do with friction between his account and the phenome-nology of unreflective action. To distinguish McDowell’s notion of conceptsfrom other notions of concepts, I will refer to his notion by the name of


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“strong concepts”. It is an apt name because it fits in with his idea that con-cepts are always involved in perception and action, and because it links upwith his views on rationality in the strong sense (strong rationality) which weencountered earlier and on spontaneity in the strong sense (strong spontane-ity) which we will encounter below. It aims to point out or flag that a differ-ent (weaker or just different) notion of concepts could play a role inunderstanding phenomena (for example animal behavior) other than the oneMcDowell is primarily interested in.

The disagreement between McDowell and Dreyfus on concepts has its ori-gin in McDowell’s claim that concepts are not only operative in cases ofreflection on the experience that emerges from unreflective action and assoon as we use language to express aspects of that experience after the fact.They are also operative when we do not step back. That is to say, concepts inhis language-related sense are operative at every stage of an episode of unre-flective action. McDowell (2007b) wants to correct Dreyfus’ impression thatin unreflective experience, in an episode of absorbed coping, conceptual abil-ities are not operative. To put it clearly, I would like to use McDowell’s ownwords:

When one is unreflectively immersed, one is exactly not exercising theability to step back. But even so the capacities operative in one’s per-ceiving or acting are conceptual, and their operations are conceptual.

Nothing is discursively explicit in these goings-on, so it might seemnatural to say, as Dreyfus does, that my view is that they are implic-itly conceptual. But it is easy to hear that as amounting to ‘onlyimplicitly conceptual’, with an implication that conceptuality wouldbe properly on the scene only after something had been made explicitin discourse or discursive thought – that is, only after the subject hadexercised the ability to step back. And that is not my view at all.(2007b, pp. 366–67)

To summarize this, McDowell clearly holds that there is more to linguisticor strong conceptuality than potential linguistic articulation at a latermoment. Yet, it does not become clear what that would be. In particular hisclaim that “the capacities operative in one’s perceiving or acting are concep-tual, and their operations are conceptual” is hard to understand.

Another collision with the phenomenology of unreflective action occurswhen McDowell (2007b) talks about the “realization” of a “practical” con-cept in unreflective action. We encountered this in Section III in the con-text of McDowell’s ideas on rationality. Examples of such practicalconcepts are in the baseball case “throwing efficiently to first base” and inthe frisbee case “catching this” (McDowell, 2007b, p. 367, p. 369). Accord-ing to McDowell,



The practical concepts realized in acting are concepts of things to do.Realizing such a concept is doing the thing in question [. . . ] (McDowell,2007b, p. 367)

Again the quotations suggest that there is more to conceptuality than poten-tial later linguistic expression. But when McDowell explains why he is soeager to say that we realize a concept in unreflective action, he only repeatsthat we, but not a dog, can articulate after the fact aspects of the experienceas well as reasons. That is to say that he does not mention anything relatedto what happens in an episode of unreflective action.16 In line with his over-all emphasis on conceptual rationality McDowell (2007b) is, in his responseto Dreyfus (2007a), more concerned with—to put it negatively—denyingthat rationality is linked to detachment, than with—to put it positively—explaining what exactly is the way in which conceptual capacities are opera-tive in unreflective action, that is, other than the (undebated, as far as I amconcerned) potential for linguistically expressing aspects of the experienceafter the action. With respect to conceptuality, McDowell’s frisbee exampleonly makes clear what in fact it means to be able to articulate experience,namely voicing reasons afterwards. (Or, as in his example, that there was noparticular reason; the person just felt like catching it.)

The conclusion is that McDowell is justified in claiming that humans pos-sess the capacity to articulate aspects of their experience of unreflectiveaction. But he does not give an argument for his phenomenologically ques-tionable further claim that concepts in his strong sense are operative in unre-flective action. He simply claims it, even though we do not seem toexperience any such concepts being operative, as Dreyfus (2007b, p. 372) cor-rectly notes. Furthermore, McDowell’s (2007b) introduction of “practicalconcepts” amounts to no more than adding yet another claim, namely that apractical concept is operative (being “realized”) in unreflective action. Butwhat remains unclear is this: why should we label the act of doing the thingin question without explicit thought as “conceptual”, given that conceptualcapacities “belong to [. . . ] a faculty that is exercised in actively self-criticalcontrol of what one thinks [. . . ]” (McDowell, 1996, p. 49)? Why should wenot hold that conceptuality in this linguistic sense only becomes operativeafter the unreflective episode?

The upshot is that McDowell does not make it plausible that conceptualcapacities are operative in unreflective action. Thus, in McDowell’s accountof conceptuality when applied to the case of unreflective action there seemsto be a tension, which deserves further investigation.

V. Taylor’s analysis of the tension in McDowell’s account of spontaneity

McDowell and Dreyfus disagree about the role of (strong) conceptuality inan episode of unreflective action. I will involve a third philosopher in an


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attempt to take the issue further. Charles Taylor is well acquainted with theworks of both. He (2002) has written on the subject of McDowell’s (1996)account of (unreflective) action and McDowell (2002) has responded tothese comments. Taylor calls unreflective action “pre-conceptual”, and thetype of know-how or understanding involved, “pre-understanding”. We willsee that the tension in McDowell’s account encountered above, was alsospotted by Taylor, albeit in a somewhat different form. Taylor’s (2002) ana-lysis of the source of this tension is illuminating.

Up to now, the more we have tried to clarify in what ways Dreyfus andMcDowell differ, the more agreement we have encountered on the phenom-enology of unreflective action. So far I have assumed that it is quite obviousthat words do not play a role in an episode of unreflective coping, but let usmake sure that Dreyfus and McDowell agree on the absence of an actual useof language. This is relevant because, although unlikely given the agreementabout the phenomena so far, McDowell’s idea that strong concepts are oper-ative or realized in unreflective action could have been based on an atypicalunderstanding of its phenomenology, in which case there would actuallyhave been far less common ground between them.

McDowell is not very explicit about his ideas on the phenomenology ofsuch an episode of unreflective action. If he holds that words do play anyrole, for example in “catching this”, and Dreyfus that they do not, their disa-greement might (at least partially) be explained by different takes on thephenomena. However, Taylor’s (2002) phenomenology of absorbed copingand McDowell’s (2002) subsequent response suggest that this is not the case.Taylor’s ideas on unreflective action are well summarized in this quotation:

Dealing with things pre-conceptually can’t involve rational, criticalreflection on world or action; it doesn’t exhibit Kantian “spontaneity”at its fullest. [. . . ] Living with things involves a certain kind of under-standing (which we might also call “pre-understanding”). [. . . ] As Inavigate my way along the path up the hill, my mind totally absorbedanticipating the difficult conversation I’m going to have at my destina-tion, I treat the different features of the terrain as obstacles, supports,openings, invitations to tread more warily, or run freely, etc. [. . . T]hesethings have those relevances for me; I know my way about amongthem.

This is non-conceptual; or put another way, language isn’t playing anydirect role. [. . . ] Ordinary coping isn’t conceptual. But at the sametime, it can’t be understood in just inanimate-causal terms. (Taylor,2002, p. 111, my italics)

This denial of a role for linguistic concepts in the experience of takingaccount of the context and dealing with affordances makes clear that Taylor



sides with Dreyfus in holding that operative concepts (in McDowell’s lan-guage-related sense) do not play a necessary role in the phenomenology ofunreflective action. In his response to Taylor (2002), McDowell (2002) didnot take issue with Taylor’s account of the phenomenology. This suggeststhat the issue between McDowell and Dreyfus is probably not the result of adifference of opinion on the phenomenology of agency in unreflectiveaction, but the result of the earlier-mentioned friction that arises whenMcDowell’s use of the notion of concepts is confronted with the phenome-nology as described by Taylor or Dreyfus.

It is important for us that Taylor (2002) makes an effort to understandMcDowell’s (1996) motivations for using his conceptual framework in theway that he does. Taylor’s analysis will help us to see why McDowell(2007b) is nevertheless so eager to claim that such concepts do play a role inunreflective action. Taylor suggests that the resolution of the tensions inMcDowell’s account could be accomplished via a better understanding ofMcDowell’s use of the notion of “spontaneity”:

Perhaps we should probe this latter term more. “Spontaneity” could bereserved for full-fledged conceptual, self-reflective thinking, a restric-tion which would suit its Kantian origins. But it figures in another wayin McDowell’s argument [. . . ] It seems also to designate [. . . ] the anto-nym to brute causal impingings on the organism [. . . ] (Taylor, 2002,p. 114, my italics)

I agree with this important analysis. Following up on this, Taylor empha-sizes that we ought to distinguish between spontaneity in a strong and in aweak sense. The first way of understanding spontaneity is the strong Kan-tian notion. This is related to the possibility of stepping back and plays arole when McDowell defines his use of the term “conceptual capacities”(strong concepts).

Taylor proposes to understand McDowell’s use of spontaneity in theweak sense as motivated by McDowell’s need for the antonym role. Giventhat we sense and respond to relevance even in unreflective or pre-conceptualactions, the perception involved is then, according to Taylor (2002, p. 115),still “participating in the space of reasons”, rather than determined by dis-enchanted causal interaction. This observation by Taylor is of crucialimportance in my opinion, because it clarifies McDowell’s eagerness tohold on to his notion of operative concepts even though the phenomenasuggest that that is questionable: claiming that concepts are operative isMcDowell’s way of ensuring that unreflective action is not understood in adisenchanted way. Moreover, it emphasizes an important starting pointfor a more parsimonious alternative: that an episode of unreflectiveresponsiveness to relevant affordances does not occur in the realm of brutecausality.


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In his response to Taylor, McDowell confirms his need for a way of inter-acting with the world that is between the purely causal on the one hand, andthe reflective on the other, to understand animal behavior and human unre-flective action:

I agree with Taylor that there is something between spontaneity inwhat he calls ‘the strong Kantian sense, turning crucially on concep-tual, reflective thought,’ on the one hand, and conformity to Galileanlaw, on the other. We need this middle ground for thinking about non-human animals, and it is what is supposed to be occupied by pre-understanding even in our case. (McDowell, 2002, p. 283)

With these words McDowell suggests that our understanding of humanunreflective action would benefit from a conceptual framework tailored tothis “middle ground”. What is important is that he does not react to Taylorby saying that this type of action can simply be grasped fully with the sameconceptual framework that he developed for reflective thought. I suggestthat a good account of the middle ground is especially important for under-standing what normativity, intentionality, freedom, agency and rationalitycould mean in an episode of unreflective action, both in our own case, and inthe cases of pre-linguistic children and animals, i.e., also independently ofany possible later linguistic articulation.

Note that weak and strong notions are not necessarily mutually exclusive.In the case of spontaneity, for example, McDowell can hold that our under-standing of unreflective action benefits from using the notion of weak spon-taneity, without committing himself to denying that humans in unreflectiveaction have the capacity to step back and reflect.

Whereas Taylor writes that unreflective action participates in the space of rea-sons, I would rather use another term that avoids misunderstandings, such asthe ones discussed in Section II, and fits in with the phenomena better. I proposethat unreflective action participates in the sphere of normative significance.

However, we have seen above that, notwithstanding his earlier agreementwith Taylor (2002), in his recent debate with Dreyfus, McDowell (2007a,2007b) again neglects this need for an account of the middle ground. Thestill prevalent need for notions that signal that we are not in the realm ofbrute causality presumably motivates McDowell’s phenomenologicallyquestionable talk of operations of concepts in such action. I will call notionsthat have the role of flagging this “weak notions”.

VI. Generalizing Taylor’s insight: McDowell’s motivation for his notion of operative conceptuality in unreflective action

McDowell’s conceptual framework for reflective intentionality consists of aset of notions that are intimately related and always show up together:



rational animals are characterized by (strong) rationality, responsiveness toreasons as such, spontaneity, conceptual capacities, subjectivity, and self-determination. Given such a starting point it is predictable that McDowellexpects them to be present all together not only in reflective action, butalways when a mature human being (rational animal) is involved. Evenwhen we do not experience any direct role for language, our unreflectiveaction participates not in the space of causation but in the space of reasonsand therefore we must have, McDowell seems to say, some form of conceptu-ality on the scene.

McDowell’s ideas on conceptuality parallel his ideas on spontaneity. Theimportance of a conceptual framework tailored for the middle ground (unre-flective action), combined with the actual absence of this middle ground inhis debate with Dreyfus, makes it possible to make sense of McDowell’svarious uses of the notion of conceptual capacities. He seems to stretch theuse of some notions in his conceptual framework for reflective intentionalityin order to be able to integrate unreflective action.

Both spontaneity and conceptuality should be understood in relation toMcDowell’s primary interest in strong rationality.17 Both Kantian freedomand having conceptual capacities require being potentially reflective:

[I]t is important that the freedom I claim [mere animals] lack is pre-cisely Kantian spontaneity, the freedom that consists in potentiallyreflective responsiveness to putative norms of reason. (McDowell,1996, p. 182)

When McDowell (2007b, p. 369) says that a dog does not have any practicalconcept “in the relevant sense”, we have to understand this in McDowell’sstrong sense of fully-fledged conceptual, which is related to the possibility ofreflection using language. And this strong sense of conceptual is also the cor-rect one for understanding the passage in which a frisbee-catching human iscontrasted with a frisbee-catching dog (presented in Section III). Thisexample is centered around the distinction between a rational animal and a“mere animal”, and the former’s possibility to reflect on the earlier action, touse words and to give reasons.

Both strong conceptual capacities and strong spontaneity emphasize theimportance of after-the-fact operations: of a (potential) linguistic articula-tion of reasons and of aspects of the content of experience, and operations ofpractical rationality. But whereas in the case of rationality McDowell makesclear that he is primarily interested in strong rationality, he does not want tosay that he is primarily interested in after-the-fact operations of conceptualcapacities, presumably for the reasons articulated by Taylor.

Taylor’s analysis seems to suggest that another way of understanding“conceptual” in the frisbee-case could be conceptual in a weak sense, alongthe lines of spontaneity in a weak sense. Perhaps the main role of “weak


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conceptuality” would then be to signal that unreflective action is not a brutecausal event. However, I think the real lesson we can learn from Taylor(2002) is that we should develop an account tailored to the specific needs ofunreflective action (the middle ground). As noted above, the relevant concep-tual framework for doing justice to this type of action on its own terms canbe more parsimonious than the complex of concepts that McDowell uses forcharacterizing reflective intentionality if we take responsiveness to relevantaffordances as our starting point. The details of this alternative will have tobe developed elsewhere (for an account of non-propositional normativity seee.g., Rietveld, 2008c). What matters is that the account as a whole makesclear that unreflective action is not a brute causal event but participates inthe sphere of normative significance thanks to our past experience and train-ing as well as our current engagement in socio-cultural practices and appre-ciation of the situation. Responsiveness to significance (including normativesignificance) should therefore be one of the central notions. With responsive-ness to normative significance in place and the dualism of norms and natureavoided, the need for and role of other notions, such as freedom, conceptu-ality and rationality, should be investigated.

It’s time to sum up. When McDowell speaks about a rational agent realizinga practical concept in unreflective action, for example when catching a fris-bee, this talk about operative concepts is presumably evoked to play the roleof an antonym to a brute causal event. However, at least for the specific caseof unreflective action, the notion of responsiveness to normative significancewould be better suited to play this role. The starting point for understand-ing intentionality and bodily agency should be neither the conceptual—non-conceptual dichotomy, nor the space of reasons—realm of law distinc-tion, but responsiveness to relevant affordances in the concrete situation.

VII. Conclusion

McDowell and Dreyfus concur that an individual in skillful action is notapplying a general maxim or subsuming cases under rules that could bearticulated by abstracting from the specific situation. Situation-specific dis-cernment and responsiveness to relevant affordances form the core of theAristotelian common ground that the two philosophers share. It is whatcharacterizes phronesis in unreflective action. Bildung makes it understanda-ble that there is nothing mysterious about this sensitivity. McDowell andDreyfus, however, have a difference of opinion about the roles of rationalityand concepts in such understanding.

McDowell wants a place for unreflective action between the purely causaland the reflective, which still participates in the space of reasons. However,rather than develop a tailored account for unreflective action, we have seenthat in his debate with Dreyfus he stretches his conceptual framework forreflective intentionality in an attempt to place unreflective action in the



space of reasons. Even though we do not experience any role for linguisticconcepts, McDowell is eager to claim that such concepts are operative inunreflective action. The resulting tensions in McDowell’s account haveeverything to do with conflicts between this stretched account and the phe-nomenology of unreflective action.

McDowell’s account of unreflective action, at least in so far as it emergesfrom his debate with Dreyfus, is not wrong, but does not fit in well with the phe-nomena. Given that he cares about getting the phenomena right, I expect that hewould be interested in the potential for improvement. An account tailored forthe middle ground does better justice to the phenomenon of unreflective coping,by describing it on its own terms, rather than on the terms of reflective thought.This basically amounts to an alternative presentation of the phenomena, foranother purpose than the one McDowell was primarily interested in.

Although in his discussion with Taylor (2002) McDowell (2002) acknowl-edges the need for an account of the middle ground in order to do justice toour (pre-) understanding in unreflective action, he does not develop a tai-lored framework for this in his discussion with Dreyfus. I suggest that weshould develop such an account based on the Aristotelian-Wittgensteiniancommon ground. Understood thus, unreflective action, with its characteris-tic responsiveness to relevant affordances, occupies a middle groundbetween “inanimate-causal interaction and full-fledged conceptual-criticalthinking” (Taylor, 2002, p. 114).

Several open questions remain. What would be the roles for conceptualcapacities and rationality in such an account? Something else that deservesfurther investigation elsewhere is the link between the individual’s respon-siveness to normative significance and what McDowell (1998, p. 53) calls areliable “single complex sensitivity” to the demands of the situation.18

Notes

1. Of course not all of our life is spent in a state of unreflective action. Sometimes we lackthe relevant skills, things go very wrong, or situations are too complex, thus forcing us toreflect or deliberate explicitly. However, I will restrict myself as much as possible toinvestigating those episodes where the activities of a skillful individual unfold adequatelywithout reflection on his or her part.

2. Skillful coping in Dreyfus’ phenomenological account is a form of skill-based unprob-lematic and unreflective activity. He (1991, p. 93) gives the following examples: playingan instrument (the piano), skiing, driving to one’s office, and brushing one’s teeth. Theseactivities are purposeful without requiring any representation of a goal. Absorbed copingis not just coping in an engaged or involved way, but is skillful coping at its best.

3. This paper was submitted and accepted before John McDowell (2008) changed his posi-tion on the content of experiences and claimed that such content is not propositionallystructured, as he had assumed previously, but intuitionally structured. My paper is lim-ited to a discussion of McDowell’s old position, which is the position that got the debatebetween McDowell and Dreyfus started and the position Dreyfus has been arguingagainst all the time. To me it seems that McDowell’s new position is more promisingthan his old one, because the assumption of propositionally structured content did not


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fit in well with the phenomena. However, a discussion of intuitional content will have towait for another occasion.

4. McDowell, for instance, recently wrote: “[R]esponsiveness to affordances, necessarilybound up with embodied coping skills, is something we share with other animals”(McDowell, 2007a, p. 344). One essential difference between our responsiveness toaffordances and that of non-language using animals is that we can be solicited by possi-bilities for action that are related to our linguistic abilities.

5. In order to include a Wittgensteinian form of phenomenology, in this paper my use ofthe term “phenomenology” is quite broad, namely the description and analysis of livedexperience. This does not necessarily require a first-person or second-person perspectivebecause an individual’s lived experience can normally also be understood and described byanother person sufficiently familiar with one’s behavioral situation. Wittgenstein’s phe-nomenology is mostly, but not always, given from this latter perspective. Merleau-Pontyand Dreyfus mostly start from the first-person perspective.

6. I do not want to suggest that phronesis is equivalent to expertise in general. Perhaps onecould argue, however, that it is equivalent to the specific expertise of acting as phronesisrequires, because phronesis amounts to “the habit of responding to situations as phrone-sis requires” (McDowell, 2007a, p. 341; but see Gallagher, 2007, for another accountthan mine).

7. Thornton (2004) does not give a reference here. He mentioned this in his section on whathe calls McDowell’s therapeutic conception of philosophical method. Thornton summa-rizes McDowell’s method of Wittgensteinian philosophical therapy with the followingexample: “The dualism that produces philosophical unrest is diagnosed as depending onan assumption. [. . . ] Because that assumption is ungrounded, it is rejected, and the eve-ryday phenomenology of norms is reinstated without the need for further justificatoryphilosophy.” (Thornton, 2004, p. 19). This therapy, which aims to give philosophy akind of peace, is also relevant in the context of moral philosophy. In that context too itsresult is a return to a form of phenomenology: “Once both of these [neo-Humean andKantian, ER] assumptions are rejected, McDowell suggests that the phenomenology ofvalue judgement can reassert itself” (Thornton, 2004, p. 19, my italics).

8. “How could human behaviour be described? Surely only by showing the actions of avariety of humans, as they are all mixed up together. Not what one man is doing now,but the whole hurly-burly, is the background against which we see any action, and itdetermines our judgment, our concepts, and our reactions” (Wittgenstein 1980 - RPPii -,p. 108, # II-629).

9. To quote Wittgenstein: “The aspects of things that are most important for us are hiddenbecause of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something—becauseit is always before one’s eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man atall. Unless that fact has at some time struck him.—And this means: we fail to be struckby what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful” (PI 129).

10. Let me give one example. McDowell (1994) criticizes another philosopher (Dennett) forgiving a misrepresentation of the phenomenology of perception. After analysis and rejec-tion of the assumption that motivated Dennett’s mistake, McDowell concludes: “Onestriking advantage to be derived from rejecting the idea that conscious perceptual experi-ence is a special kind of access to content that is in the first instance sub-personal, i.e., tothe content of events or states in our interiors, is that it enables us to repossess the phe-nomenology of perception” (McDowell, 1994, p. 204, my italics).

11. We will see that Bildung makes this “somehow” understandable.12. Strong rationality (see McDowell, 2007b, p. 366) should be distinguished from the

rationality that could be ascribed to animals (for example the rationality involved in fleeingfrom danger) but also from the more general notion of rationality used in McDowell’s(1998b) discussion of rule-following.



13. Note, by the way, that stepping back does not necessarily imply detachment or separa-tion from practical significance (McDowell, 2007b, p. 369).

14. Given the first of these remarks and McDowell’s emphasis on the possibility of linguisticarticulation, which I will discuss below, he also does not claim, as was suggested byWrathall (2005, p. 125), that “the world is presented at the outset as being proposition-ally articulated”. Wrathall (2005, p. 117) makes the mistake of assuming that reasons“must be” propositional for McDowell. Since Wrathall explains Merleau-Ponty’s notionof motives by contrasting them with reasons, this problematic assumption diminishes thevalue of his middle ground between causes and reasons for our purposes. Dreyfus char-acterizes Merleau-Pontian motives by responsiveness to solicitations to act: “[Merleau-Ponty’s notion of ‘motivation’] names the way we are directly responsive to the [. . . ]demands of our situation. In short, it is a name for the way affordances solicit one to act.[. . . ] True to the phenomenon of affordance and response, plus the [normative, ER] ten-dency to achieve maximal grip, Merleau-Ponty is led to introduce, between the space ofcauses and the space of reasons, what one might call the space of motivations” (Dreyfus,2005a, pp. 56–57). Actions in the space of motivations are not characterized by proposi-tional intentionality but by “motor intentionality”: “Merleau-Ponty calls the sort ofintentionality definitive of the space of motivations, motor intentionality” (Dreyfus,2005a, p. 64; cf. Thompson, 2007). It is important to see that what I call the “sphere ofnormative significance” encompasses both the space of motivations and the space of rea-sons, both motor intentionality and propositional intentionality. It is primarily meant toserve as the contrast to the non-normative domain that McDowell needs according toTaylor (to be discussed Sections V and VI).

15. Although it is not directly relevant for understanding unreflective action, I must say thatMcDowell does not make it very plausible that all content is suitable for linguistic artic-ulation. Consider Wittgenstein’s coffee aroma-example. In contrast to McDowell(2007a), he (PI 610) does not seem to think that potentially we can put the experience ofthe aroma of coffee into words. Wittgenstein suggests that, even if we introduce newwords, something about the content of this experience will resist articulation.

16. Let me repeat the relevant sentence for the reader’s convenience: “The point of sayingthat the rational agent, unlike the dog, is realizing a concept in doing what she does isthat her doing, under a specification that captures the content of the practical conceptthat she is realizing, comes within the scope of her practical rationality – even if only inthat, if asked why she caught the frisbee, she would answer ‘No particular reason; I justfelt like it’” (McDowell, 2007b, p. 369).

17. The first five sentences of McDowell’s (2007a, pp. 338–39) article emphasize the linkbetween conceptual capacities and strong rationality. He (2007b) stresses this linkbetween strong rationality and conceptuality also on the first page of his secondresponse to Dreyfus.

18. I would like to thank Chantal Bax, Giovanna Colombetti, Janna van Grunsven, OlivierPutois, Richard Ridderinkhof, Tim Thornton, Rasmus Thybo Jensen, and Paul Voester-mans for helpful feedback on earlier versions of this paper. I owe special thanks to MartinStokhof and Hubert Dreyfus. I did part of the research for this paper during my stay as avisiting scholar at UC Berkeley in 2006 and Harvard University in 2006 and 2008. Theseresearch visits were funded by NWO, “Netherlands Organisation for ScientificResearch”. I would like to express my gratitude for awarding these grants.

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